In one PingBody event, Stelarc (located in Luxembourg) had his muscles stimulated by Web viewers in remote cities (Helsinki, Paris, and Amsterdam). In another PingBody event, he linked his body’s muscles directly to Net activity levels (with the length of time for a message to be sent to a location and return used as an indicator of the Internet’s traffic in particular locations).
Stelarc is a passionate spokesperson for a vision of humanity that reaches beyond the present limits of bodies. Defying categorization into either cyber optimism or cyber pessimism, Stelarc has created provocative events that sit uneasily in both worlds. His works reflect on current theoretical speculations on cultural control of the body but do not fit neatly into its categories. They go beyond the place that most serious researchers have yet ventured. Telecommunications is part of what fascinates Stelarc: How can we create composite, remotely linked bodies that question traditional notions of “owner- ship” and locating the self ? Telepresentally linked bodies can create
a shifting, sliding awareness that is neither “all-here” in this body nor “all-there” in those bodies. This is not about a fragmented body but a multiplicity of bodies and parts of bodies prompting and remotely guiding each other. This is not about master-slave control mechanisms but feedback- loops of alternate awareness, agency, and of split physiologies . . . the body not as a site of inscription but as a medium for the manifestation of remote agents.
In our Platonic, Cartesian, and Freudian pasts these might have been considered pathological, and in our Foucaultian present we focus on inscription and control of the body. . . . Bodies must